Hot Rod Was a Failure, and So Was Every Prophet in His Own Hometown

In 2007, a movie called Hot Rod opened to about five million dollars, ended up around fourteen million, cost something like twenty-five, and was reviewed by the critics with the gentle enthusiasm of a man identifying a body. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 39 percent to this day. The Lonely Island, who made it, have said they spent years more or less pretending it was someone else's.

Now, I have always believed that the critic and the public are two different animals, and the critic is the one that bites. The public will forgive you almost anything if you make them laugh. The critic will forgive you almost nothing, unless you are French, and dead.

Here is the plot, and I'll tell it straight, because it doesn't need help. Andy Samberg plays Rod Kimball, an amateur stuntman, who sets out to raise money for his stepfather's heart surgery. He wants the stepfather healthy for one reason: so he can finally beat him up. That's the whole thing. That is a noble mission, if you look at it the right way, and I have looked at it every way, and I am satisfied.

The stepfather is played by Ian McShane, an actor who could make a grocery list sound like a threat. The mother is played by Sissy Spacek, who has an Academy Award, which she apparently was willing to set on the table for this. Bill Hader and Danny McBride are in the crew. Isla Fisher is the girl. Every one of them commits to the nonsense like it was Shakespeare, and that's the secret of good nonsense. You can't wink. The minute you wink, the audience stops laughing and starts feeling sorry for you.

The jokes go on too long. Then they go on longer. Then, somewhere past the point of decency, they become funny again, the way a man falling down a hill becomes funny again around the fourth bounce. Critics in 2007 saw a mess. The internet, which has nothing but time, saw a style, and kept passing the scenes around for nearly twenty years. A failure that people keep quoting is not a failure. It's a success that showed up late, like a train in Italy.

I'll grant the other side its point. If you don't laugh at Hot Rod in the first ten minutes, you won't laugh at it at all, and you should go do something useful, like taxes. But a movie isn't wrong just because it arrived before its audience did. Most prophets were run out of their hometowns. Very few of them had a moped.